Mycoplasma Genitalium - Synthetic Life

Synthetic Life

In October 2007, a team of scientists headed by DNA researcher Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith announced that they plan to create the first artificial life form in history by creating a synthetic chromosome, which they plan to inject into the M. genitalium bacterium, with potential to result in an artificial species dubbed Mycoplasma laboratorium or Mycoplasma JCVI-1.0 after the research centre in which it was created, the J. Craig Venter Institute in the United States.

On 24 January 2008, the same team reported to have synthesized the complete 582,970-base pair genome of M. genitalium (a key gene that enables the wild organism to cause disease was knocked out). The final stage of synthesis was completed inside a M capricolum, which had its DNA removed, with the help of yeast cells. On 20 May 2010 they reported success with a similar process, using instead the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, creating what some called the first artificial life.

On 20 July 2012, Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute announced successful simulation of the complete life cycle of a Mycoplasma genitalium cell, in the journal Cell. The entire organism is modeled in terms of its molecular components, integrating all cellular processes into a single model. Using object oriented programming to model the interactions of 28 categories of molecules including DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites, and running on 128-core Linux cluster, the simulation takes 10 hours for a single M. genitalium cell to divide once — about the same time the actual cell takes — and generates half a gigabyte of data.